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> They keep encountering highly flawed websites or web apps and are assuming that regular web devs can do something about it. This is the reality that has been

> They keep encountering highly flawed websites or web apps and are assuming that regular web devs can do something about it. This is the reality that has been grinding me down of late. Nor do I find it limited to only web stuff. I see it in embedded and other market areas. I was excited over the last few decades to see the field of programmers swell. I have always loved the craft of good software development. I was so excited to see so many others also get into it and naively believed that many more people participating would lead to a larger pool of ideas to draw from and everyone would get on board in some sort of utopian democratic industry wide kumbaya. During the rise of open source, I even felt it was really happening. I now believe I was wrong.

jdougan 4y ago
If the dev pool of 2022 was like the dev pool of (for example) 1994, just larger, you would have been right. But the software goldrush came and attracted many more who were just in it for the money or just weren't as thoughtful. Scale matters, upscaling people is hard.
- iratewizard 4y ago
  I've got a strong suspicion that there would be more productivity if the bottom half of developer (or more) left the industry. Control for seniority, of course. The majority of 1Xers produce outright bad code, contribute disproportionately to tech debt, don't read user stories thoroughly, don't test their code properly, and generally get in everyone else's way. The most productive thing our industry could do is create an anonymous blacklist of devs to avoid and code samples of their shit work.
  - notpachet 4y ago
    > anonymous blacklist of devs to avoid and code samples of their shit work. Sounds like Github Copilot.
    - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
      Hmm, just need to fork it and call it "Nopilot" (though personally I find Copilot to be sometimes handy, it makes plausible guesses when I am doing something repetitive, I'm sure that's because my code isn't DRY enough etc. but it saves me a little time)
  - chefandy 4y ago
    Really? I think the most productive thing the industry could do is get rid of developers who drastically overvalue their own work, methods, and ideas, haughtily dismiss the value of others’ contributions out of hand, and blame everyone else for a project’s shortcomings. You can usually ID them by their persistently rolled eyes, big fish in small pond mentality, and 1.9 septillion reputation on Stack Overflow.
    - iratewizard 4y ago
      It sounds like I struck a nerve. Does it hurt you knowing there are a lot of developers out there that contribute more in a week than you do in several months?
      - pprotas 4y ago
        And yet we both get paid the same!
        iratewizard 4y ago
        Software engineering has huge ranges of salary. Not only do I doubt you get paid the same, but I also doubt you get paid as much as my best performing lead engineers.
      - chefandy 4y ago
        "It sounds like I struck a nerve" is the world's laziest and most immature rhetorical non-response to someone pointing out your obnoxious behavior.
    - shreyshnaccount 4y ago
      you're both wrong. the most productive thing would be to grow up and help bring the better out in each other. create an environment thats about the skill. set aside ego and focus on building something wonderful. but doesn't seem that's gonna happen soon. (i dont really like bigtech, but the "blameless" culture seems like it could be very productive and save many a dramatic exits)
  - zo1 4y ago
    Agreed, I'd argue the even higher meta problem is that we're afraid to hurt feelings. Because there is such a big drive for growth and more bodies, we have to tip toe around crap work and crap work ethics. Nothing wrong with being a bad dev perse if you accept it and learn to improve. But instead we ego stroke juniors and poor quality developers, inflate their contributions, inflate their title and then wonder when everything is shit at the end of the day. Those poorly trained juniors and boot camp devs are now eng managers, CTOs and loud evangelists that are driving our industry into the gutter with billions of funding.
- atmartins 4y ago
  I'm not sure the ratio is that different. In 1994 how many different browsers, connection speeds, phishing scams, competitors shipping fast forcing you to do similar to stay competitive, accessibility considerations, etc. If memory serves, it was dramatically less than now. This thread of comments is kinda weird to me, there's like a romanticized view of old timers or something, and the problem must be the young, money hungry and unenthused. It feels like boring old internet gatekeeping and is not insightful. There is a totally different world in tech now than in 1994. Tons of stuff and often optimized for mean time to recovery. I crave quality too (believe me) but I think shipping fast and breaking a few eggs (not directly but that's essentially what you're left with) is what is asked of engineers in 2022. All of my peers seem to care about quality and we do our best but even in the days of buying software on floppy disks, bugs existed.
- rektide 4y ago
  The scope of problems being solved is much higher. Adding a two or three libraries- jquery and a plugin or two- and not giving a toss about performance was indeed easy. Few auxiliary tools were required. Back then, we all could have a pretty strong hand on the wheel of our websites & how they functioned, at a detailed level. It was feasible, for the scope was small. But now, we all use package managers, we all use bundlers, we all use minifiers, we all use production builds, we all use tree shakers. Any one of these concerns is a significant realm that tends to have significant people-years worth of work poured into it. The need for these capabilities distances the practitioner from the core truth of the media: we no longer see clearly what we are doing, we no longer have personal stake or control in the processes. There's still a strong latent desire to re-simplify, to de-configure the web, to de-build it. We had hopes that EcmaScript Modules would help, we had hope HTTP2 Push would be a viable delivery platform, for un-tooling, but we never really made an earnest go at tackling the optimization problems that all brought in; works like Cache-Digest never de-facto materialized or got made-available. Front-end architecture similarly has been dominated by high-abstraction top-down frameworks, namely React, which complects in a wide host of assumptions/abstractions that distance the practitioner from the actual media-form. Just as ESM was a hope that we might get back to understandable, without lots of framework/tools, WebComponents too presents a hope that we can strip away a lot of the specific complexity & find a more inter-modular, general & understandable grounding. The web can & should be at a similar power level to where it is, more so, but in more honest, accessible, direct manners than the crafted-of-necessity deep layering we cobble with today.
  - kimi 4y ago
    > and not giving a toss about performance was indeed easy. Few auxiliary tools were required. When the internet came through a modem and bandwidth was very expensive, performance was concern #1. So pages were kilobytes, not multi-megabyte monstruosities.
    - Tade0 4y ago
      > When the internet came through a modem and bandwidth was very expensive, That effectively ended in the mid 00s. Otherwise we wouldn't have had services like YouTube. Between those times and around 2012 there was an explosion of script bloat because back then it was more important to have an interactive page than a fast page. Bandwidth resurfaced as a concern only with the proliferation of mobile devices. The whole premise of tree shaking, introduced in 2012 was to reduce bloat.
_carbyau_ 4y ago
> This is the reality that has been grinding me down of late. Nor do I find it limited to only web stuff. I see it in embedded and other market areas. sigh We have hardware doing billions of instructions per second, capable of transporting at least 500Mb/s within my computer, 120+Hz screens and yet: - Windows 10 desktop -> opening Start menu = 5 seconds wait. A trite example but once you look it is everywhere. This stuff grinds my gears every damn day.
- dieortin 4y ago
  The start menu opens instantly in my computer, so that problem isn’t universal.
  - _carbyau_ 4y ago
    Absolutely! I could likely find the issue but it isn't obvious. So the complaint remains: for this extremely common and predictable use case, why is it not more reliable? The main point is that problems like this are spotted everywhere in daily life. Time delays without apparent reason, questionable UI choices. The complaint is not failure to work - they do work and are often widely used. But the experience is suboptimal for no apparent reason. Similar to the article - whoever did this [latest annoying thing] needs to look at the "more better" example and just do that. edit: Tried to write a shorter comment.

jdougan 4y ago

If the dev pool of 2022 was like the dev pool of (for example) 1994, just larger, you would have been right. But the software goldrush came and attracted many more who were just in it for the money or just weren't as thoughtful. Scale matters, upscaling people is hard.

iratewizard 4y ago
I've got a strong suspicion that there would be more productivity if the bottom half of developer (or more) left the industry. Control for seniority, of course. The majority of 1Xers produce outright bad code, contribute disproportionately to tech debt, don't read user stories thoroughly, don't test their code properly, and generally get in everyone else's way. The most productive thing our industry could do is create an anonymous blacklist of devs to avoid and code samples of their shit work.
- notpachet 4y ago
  > anonymous blacklist of devs to avoid and code samples of their shit work. Sounds like Github Copilot.
  - blacksmith_tb 4y ago
    Hmm, just need to fork it and call it "Nopilot" (though personally I find Copilot to be sometimes handy, it makes plausible guesses when I am doing something repetitive, I'm sure that's because my code isn't DRY enough etc. but it saves me a little time)
- chefandy 4y ago
  Really? I think the most productive thing the industry could do is get rid of developers who drastically overvalue their own work, methods, and ideas, haughtily dismiss the value of others’ contributions out of hand, and blame everyone else for a project’s shortcomings. You can usually ID them by their persistently rolled eyes, big fish in small pond mentality, and 1.9 septillion reputation on Stack Overflow.
  - iratewizard 4y ago
    It sounds like I struck a nerve. Does it hurt you knowing there are a lot of developers out there that contribute more in a week than you do in several months?
    - pprotas 4y ago
      And yet we both get paid the same!
      - iratewizard 4y ago
        Software engineering has huge ranges of salary. Not only do I doubt you get paid the same, but I also doubt you get paid as much as my best performing lead engineers.
    - chefandy 4y ago
      "It sounds like I struck a nerve" is the world's laziest and most immature rhetorical non-response to someone pointing out your obnoxious behavior.
  - shreyshnaccount 4y ago
    you're both wrong. the most productive thing would be to grow up and help bring the better out in each other. create an environment thats about the skill. set aside ego and focus on building something wonderful. but doesn't seem that's gonna happen soon. (i dont really like bigtech, but the "blameless" culture seems like it could be very productive and save many a dramatic exits)
- zo1 4y ago
  Agreed, I'd argue the even higher meta problem is that we're afraid to hurt feelings. Because there is such a big drive for growth and more bodies, we have to tip toe around crap work and crap work ethics. Nothing wrong with being a bad dev perse if you accept it and learn to improve. But instead we ego stroke juniors and poor quality developers, inflate their contributions, inflate their title and then wonder when everything is shit at the end of the day. Those poorly trained juniors and boot camp devs are now eng managers, CTOs and loud evangelists that are driving our industry into the gutter with billions of funding.
atmartins 4y ago
I'm not sure the ratio is that different. In 1994 how many different browsers, connection speeds, phishing scams, competitors shipping fast forcing you to do similar to stay competitive, accessibility considerations, etc. If memory serves, it was dramatically less than now. This thread of comments is kinda weird to me, there's like a romanticized view of old timers or something, and the problem must be the young, money hungry and unenthused. It feels like boring old internet gatekeeping and is not insightful. There is a totally different world in tech now than in 1994. Tons of stuff and often optimized for mean time to recovery. I crave quality too (believe me) but I think shipping fast and breaking a few eggs (not directly but that's essentially what you're left with) is what is asked of engineers in 2022. All of my peers seem to care about quality and we do our best but even in the days of buying software on floppy disks, bugs existed.
rektide 4y ago
The scope of problems being solved is much higher. Adding a two or three libraries- jquery and a plugin or two- and not giving a toss about performance was indeed easy. Few auxiliary tools were required. Back then, we all could have a pretty strong hand on the wheel of our websites & how they functioned, at a detailed level. It was feasible, for the scope was small. But now, we all use package managers, we all use bundlers, we all use minifiers, we all use production builds, we all use tree shakers. Any one of these concerns is a significant realm that tends to have significant people-years worth of work poured into it. The need for these capabilities distances the practitioner from the core truth of the media: we no longer see clearly what we are doing, we no longer have personal stake or control in the processes. There's still a strong latent desire to re-simplify, to de-configure the web, to de-build it. We had hopes that EcmaScript Modules would help, we had hope HTTP2 Push would be a viable delivery platform, for un-tooling, but we never really made an earnest go at tackling the optimization problems that all brought in; works like Cache-Digest never de-facto materialized or got made-available. Front-end architecture similarly has been dominated by high-abstraction top-down frameworks, namely React, which complects in a wide host of assumptions/abstractions that distance the practitioner from the actual media-form. Just as ESM was a hope that we might get back to understandable, without lots of framework/tools, WebComponents too presents a hope that we can strip away a lot of the specific complexity & find a more inter-modular, general & understandable grounding. The web can & should be at a similar power level to where it is, more so, but in more honest, accessible, direct manners than the crafted-of-necessity deep layering we cobble with today.
- kimi 4y ago
  > and not giving a toss about performance was indeed easy. Few auxiliary tools were required. When the internet came through a modem and bandwidth was very expensive, performance was concern #1. So pages were kilobytes, not multi-megabyte monstruosities.
  - Tade0 4y ago
    > When the internet came through a modem and bandwidth was very expensive, That effectively ended in the mid 00s. Otherwise we wouldn't have had services like YouTube. Between those times and around 2012 there was an explosion of script bloat because back then it was more important to have an interactive page than a fast page. Bandwidth resurfaced as a concern only with the proliferation of mobile devices. The whole premise of tree shaking, introduced in 2012 was to reduce bloat.

_carbyau_ 4y ago

> This is the reality that has been grinding me down of late. Nor do I find it limited to only web stuff. I see it in embedded and other market areas. sigh We have hardware doing billions of instructions per second, capable of transporting at least 500Mb/s within my computer, 120+Hz screens and yet: - Windows 10 desktop -> opening Start menu = 5 seconds wait. A trite example but once you look it is everywhere. This stuff grinds my gears every damn day.

dieortin 4y ago
The start menu opens instantly in my computer, so that problem isn’t universal.
- _carbyau_ 4y ago
  Absolutely! I could likely find the issue but it isn't obvious. So the complaint remains: for this extremely common and predictable use case, why is it not more reliable? The main point is that problems like this are spotted everywhere in daily life. Time delays without apparent reason, questionable UI choices. The complaint is not failure to work - they do work and are often widely used. But the experience is suboptimal for no apparent reason. Similar to the article - whoever did this [latest annoying thing] needs to look at the "more better" example and just do that. edit: Tried to write a shorter comment.